Mighty delicate
If you think of Swindon as a railway town, which, as the location of the GWR locomotive works it certainly became in the 19th century, you’d expect it to have at least one water tower. It still has more than one, and this is my favourite. It’s on the edge of the railway works site, and is extra tall so that it could provide water at high pressure, for fire-fighting. It was built in 1870 using components of cast iron and the strength of the ironwork and its bracing is enough to create a tall structure bearing what must have been a prodigious weight of water in the tanks on top.
The delicacy of this structure, which reminds me of the appearance of the iron frameworks around gas holders, tricks the eye somewhat. There are four stages to the tower, marked by a succession of cast-iron girders, and each is far bigger than a single storey of a conventional house – it’s roughly 75 feet tall all told I think and the tanks are about 2 metres high. By 1870, Victorian engineers were very good at building iron framework structures. After all, they’d had lots of experience, constructing bridges and making load-bearing frames for factories. It might have been easy for them, but, seeing a frame exposed like this – and beautifully preserved too – still impresses me, mightily.
Whenever I'm anywhere in that vicinity I try to get to McArthur Glen. My wife enjoys the shopping and I enjoy the locomotives on display! Presumably that structure is in that area?
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The tank isn't the original one, which was bigger, occupying the whole of the "floor" area of the tower.
ReplyDeleteBazza: Yes. Tat's all part of the GWR complex; the water tower is on the edge of that complex.
ReplyDeleteUnknown: Thank you! I didn't know how much bigger the original was.
ReplyDeleteAbout 45 years ago, I rode a Greyhound bus from Denver to the East Coast and back. On one of the early stages, I sat next to a recent graduate of Keble College, obviously a very intelligent man but not acquainted with American ways. As we pulled into some town on the plains, he pointed out a water tower and asked what it was: he had seen quite a few of them, but hadn't figure out what they were. I explained.
ReplyDeleteThe same man had had to figure out why we in American had so many E-Zed businesses.
Other places succeeded in making their water towers into things of beauty. Swindon seems to have failed. Ironwork rusts: the road bridge going at a steep angle over the railway at Bargoed, South Wales, seemed held on by a thread. The engineering side of me was more concerned than the aesthetic.
ReplyDeleteGeorge: The Keble graduate must have lived a sheltered life! There are plenty of water towers in Britain, but the question was clearly not E-Zee for him.
ReplyDeleteMy apologies. "Unknown's" earlier comment wasn't intended to be anonymous. It was an accidental oversight!
ReplyDeleteThere is a picture of the tower with its original tank on p.91 of (the excellent)
"Swindon: The Legacy of a Railway Town" (John Cattell and Keith Falconer, RCHME, 1995).